As pioneers of 20th-century culture, WB Yeats and the Beatles share a privileged position in cultural history, yet the two are rarely associated with each other. Despite their apparent differences, many parallels can be drawn between the career of the Irish poet and the Liverpudlian band. They share the same distinctive arc of instant success and its aftermath in the public eye. Although the career of the Beatles was concentrated within a 10-year period, their impact was monumental and arguably influenced every music group that followed, most notably Oasis. Yeats’s career was much longer, roughly spanning the years 1889 to 1939, but it too had a gargantuan influence on subsequent poets, simultaneously in Ireland and internationally in the global Modernist movement. Both were huge cultural exports for their countries and both were deeply fixated by a childhood space: Liverpool for the Beatles, and Sligo for Yeats. Both are mainly remembered for their earliest work and, because of this, their artistic development is often overlooked, arguably the greatest parallel between the two.
As the Beatles burst into the Swinging Sixties, they slotted into an already emergent rock n’ roll genre, simultaneously emulating this sound and crafting their own. Yeats’s earliest poems emulated the style of the Gaelic Mode poetry and he soon established his poetry as the basis for the Celtic Twilight movement. Just as the Beatles were still covering other artists’ songs, Yeats imitated the style of his predecessors. “The Stolen Child” couldn’t have been written without William Allingham’s “The Faeries”, meanwhile, “Twist and Shout” wasn’t written by or for the Beatles, yet it is commonly associated with them. Other Yeats poems from this period include “Lake Isle to Innisfree” and “When You Are Old”, which are similar in subject to the popular ballads the Beatles churned out. Although not their most critically acclaimed work, these were their most famous, for both Yeats and the Beatles.
Following their initial success, the two began to establish their individuality. Yeats led the Celtic Twilight movement and exemplified this in his poetry. The Beatles identified themselves through “A Hard Day’s Night”. This was their first album to feature only original songs, marking themselves out from the competition. Yeats’s poetry from this period includes “Hosting of the Sidhe” and “He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven”, the latter corresponding in subject with the Beatles song “And I Love Her”. These still draw upon the same themes as their earlier work, but with more of an individual mark.
What could come after the high? The low. Yeats suddenly became disillusioned with the Celtic Twilight movement, but also with contemporary Irish society, and his poetry from this period is marked with a tone of despair. In 1965, The Beatles released “Help!”, which signalled for the first time the band’s frustration with fame and being overworked. In his own period of disillusionment, Yeats wrote one of his most famous poems, “September 1913”, bitterly lamenting the current state of Irish society. As a poet and public figure, Yeats needed to admit to the divided realities of the Ireland he had so previously romanticised. The Beatles song “Yesterday” matches this tone: “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away / Now it looks as though they’re here to stay.”
This acceptance of reality proved fruitful for both artists. “Rubber Soul” was the Beatles’s next venture and demonstrates a more acoustic and natural approach to songwriting. At a similar point in his career, Yeats was becoming more and more entranced by Coole Park, the Galway home of Lady Gregory. He would regain his love for the natural world and switch from a fascination with Sligo to Galway. His most spectacular poems from this period are “The Wild Swans At Coole” and “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”, the latter being a poor Irish pilot’s reflection on his life and the community he will leave behind, sentiments which are reminiscent of the Beatles’ bittersweet “In My Life.”
The political climate of their time would greatly influence the artists. The Beatles released Revolver in 1966, an album highly charged by their use of LSD. At the tail end of the War of Independence (1919 to 1921) in Ireland, Yeats published “Easter 1916”, his reluctant stance on the Easter Rising. His reflection upon the frivolous death and destruction of the war, exacerbated by propagandic calls for young men to rise up and put themselves in the way of danger, echoes the Beatles’ increasing dependence on drugs for songwriting and the danger such hedonism brings to young people. Revolver is considered by some to be the best album by the Beatles, while this poetry by Yeats is often considered timeless and exemplary of any political crisis. “Easter 1916“ resembles the tone of “Eleanor Rigby”: a reflection on mortality and the legacy of those who have left us behind. The dialogue between Pearse and Connolly in “The Rose Tree” eerily parallels with “She Said She Said”, a song about a near-death experience on drugs. Finally, “The Second Coming”, a reflection on apocalyptic post-war Europe, which has experienced a surge in popularity lately due to its prophetic pertinence, relates to the mystical nature of “Tomorrow Never Knows”, a haunting love letter to the numbing, death-like effects of LSD.
At this stage, Yeats was becoming increasingly critically acclaimed. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and to follow this up, he published his seminal and ground-breaking collection, The Tower, in 1928. He named the collection after his tower in Ballylee, Galway which he bought and restored to be a symbol for his writing, his poetic image. The Beatles also created an illusion in the form of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, masking themselves behind personas. Both the Beatles and Yeats had non-existent private lives at this point and it is telling that they constructed new public identities for themselves. Yeats’ celebrated poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”, where he dreams of a Utopian golden paradise, can be compared to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
Following the desperate illusions of The Tower and Sgt Pepper came disillusionment. Yeats had become cynical of the newly formed Irish Free State, but also of his own legacy. The Anglo-Irish class that he had long identified with was now on the brink of extinction and Yeats was torn between the modern Ireland and the Ireland he was leaving behind. Cracks were beginning to show for the Beatles also. The recording sessions for The White Album (also known as The Beatles) were fraught with division and conflict, resulting in a variety of songs with little artistic unity between them. The most inciting song is “Helter Skelter”, which has alarming resonances with Yeats’s “Blood and the Moon”. In Yeats’s poem, he presents the Tower symbol and picks it apart, presenting it as a “winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair” which is “half dead at the top”. “Helter Skelter” evokes the sickening, spiralling motions of going from the top to the bottom of the slide. Each work portrays a frustration of going around in circles and emulates the vexations of the artists during these periods.
Despite these frustrations, the final work of Yeats and the Beatles ensure a more contented closure to their legacies. In 1969, the Beatles had their final ever recording session together which resulted in Abbey Road – an album later renowned as not just one of the Beatles’s greatest albums, but one of the greatest albums of all time. Yeats brought his themes and preoccupations full circle as he reflected upon his lifetime of friends and influences. One of Yeats’s most iconic late poems is “Under Ben Bulben”, a masterpiece written months before his death in which he assigns his childhood fixation, Sligo, as his final resting place and cites his famous epitaph: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death / Horseman, pass by!” The closure for Abbey Road lies in angelic “The End”, invoking a message of love and bringing their music full circle. Yeats died in 1939, months before the outbreak of World War II. Ringo Starr and John Lennon were born in 1940. Eerily, they narrowly missed out on crossing one another’s paths.
